Telstra Health streamlines business processes post-acquisition with Celigo

About

Telstra Health, part of Australia’s largest telecommunications company, Telstra, has rapidly evolved from a series of acquisitions and start-up lines of business to Australia’s largest provider of digital solutions and services to healthcare providers and governments across the care continuum. Telstra Health’s solutions support a broad range of public and private healthcare providers across Australia, the UK and beyond. 

In 2021, Telstra Health acquired MedicalDirector, a leading medical software company in Australia. Each year, MedicalDirector’s software processes more than 80 million patient consultations and is used by more than 23,000 primary care providers to support everything from patient billing to care coordination. 

Background 

At the time of the acquisition, MedicalDirector used NetSuite as its ERP. To create consistency across the rest of the organisation, Telstra Health required MedicalDirector to standardize to the organization’s use of Microsoft Dynamics Finance & Operations. 

MedicalDirector was already using Celigo to integrate its quote-to-cash processes between its ERP and Salesforce with excellent results. The MedicalDirector and Telstra Health teams decided to see if Dynamics and Salesforce could be integrated just as effectively.

The challenge

When planning the migration, there wasn’t a native connector they could leverage that would automatically bring data from their Dynamics ERP into Salesforce and vice versa. This could make the shift to the new ERP a complex undertaking involving custom flows and mapping.  

The team also wanted to make the switch with as few disruptions to current team processes as possible. “The goal was to implement a like-for-like integration without disturbing the sales team and the sales process,” said Brett Olsen, Head of Business Systems at MedicalDirector / Telstra Health. “We basically had to rebuild a Salesforce-to-Dynamics integration without significant interruption.” 

Telstra Health decided to extend MedicalDirector’s usage of Celigo to help carry out a more seamless move to Microsoft Dynamics. 

The solution

Initially, Telstra Health considered hiring a partner to architect and build out the integration, but quickly realised an in-house provider would deliver greater control. After discussing the project with Celigo’s professional services experts, the team decided to dive into creating the flows on the Celigo platform. To get started, the entire team received certification via Celigo University, and thanks to the platform’s user-friendly and intuitive nature, they quickly gained proficiency. 

Because Dynamics had limited capabilities to transform the data directly, Celigo carried out some of the transformations that normally would have happened within the ERP. According to Olsen, some of Celigo’s basic features, including composite updates, conditional flows, and branching, had a huge impact on the project’s success. 

By using custom flows, Telstra Health connected Dynamics to its tech stack smoothly with no interruption to the sales teams. This provided value to the finance team, which could operate off a consolidated ERP. “Getting both the Finance and Sales teams the information they needed in one place with no disruption to the business was a huge win for us,” Olsen said.

The team built custom flows that connected the ERP to the rest of the tech stack without disrupting the sales cycle. “There was no interruption to the sales team, so they were happy,” Olsen said. “And the finance team is happy too because they can just use one ERP system, and they’re getting all the data that they need. So, it worked out really, really successfully.”

After completing the ERP project, Telstra Health considered other ways it could benefit from Celigo’s services. Together, Telstra Health and Celigo set up a new Jira integration, which was completed in two days. “Now we are already on version three of that Jira integration, making constant improvements that continue to deliver efficiencies to the business.” 

Telstra Health also built a Stripe integration to simplify its customer renewals and is working on a second iteration of its customer portal, which surfaces key information from Salesforce via Celigo integrations.

Bottom line

Celigo has been instrumental in helping some of the integrations involved in Telstra Health’s acquisition of MedicalDirector. By implementing a new ERP without any disruptions to current processes, the company has saved a significant amount of time and potential employee frustration. “The business keeps running, and there’s no change in the process. That makes a huge impact,” Olsen said. 

In the near future, the team will release V2 of its customer portal, which is built in part on Celigo flows. Telstra Health also plans to implement Salesforce across other areas of the business and will rely on the team’s expertise and experience to help jumpstart the project.